Last summer, a $4M investment was made into a $7.5M round for Mercury, a fan engagement company for collegiate sports programs. Other investors included Brevan Howard Digital, North Island, and Crosslink Capital. The original investment thesis was built around the premise of NIL (name, image, likeness). The NCAA was sued many years ago by former players who argued that their schools made billions of dollars through their efforts, yet shared none of it. It ultimately went to the Supreme Court and on July 1, 2021 the court mandated the NCAA rescind their long-standing rule that college athletes couldn’t monetize their name, image, and likeness. That ruling was a catalyst which opened a new market for college athletes to monetize themselves.
Mercury was initially hoping to use NFTs as the shortcut to acquire customers, funnel money to athletes, and then build content around them. However, the NFT market for consumer/retail fell apart in the Fall and died with FTX. NFT quickly became a dirty word and the company was forced to change direction. Much of the core thesis has remained the same, except that NFTs are no longer the hook for customer acquisition. Rather, they are leaning into content as a way to attract eyeballs to generate sponsor/booster/fan dollars.
Mercury just brought in Rob Petrausch from Facebook to be their CRO. He was there for 10 years and led a team there responsible for $200M in annual ad/media sales. Prior to that was founding CRO of UrbanDaddy, scaling them from $0 to $70M in revenue. His job is going to be packaging the various shows, franchises, clips, and podcasts to sell to sponsors and brands. The goal moving forward is to flip the model and have the universities pay Mercury, and not the other way around.
Mercury sits in the center of all of these tailwinds, acting in a positive sum way between the athletes, the fans, and the universities. They are quickly grabbing attention and eyeballs through their content and series, and in a small period of time have built a brand that has serious momentum and market positioning in the industry. Athletes want to work with Mercury. Mercury gets players paid. Mercury packages athletes and delivers them to brands, making Mercury a critical industry player from a school perspective.
The strategy seems to be working, albeit it’s still early. In terms of recent progress and momentum, they are negotiating a media/content deal with the Big 12 conference, which would pay them $500k to create content and original series showcasing the conference. They also have inbound demand from two other conferences. They have NIL deals with over 100 athletes over the past 3 years. They have a similar deal with the star quarterback at Clemson, Cade Klubnik. Dabo Swinney, head coach at Clemson, two weeks ago requested that Mercury utilize their new podcast facility at their NIL center for a weekly show with his athletes covering his team. They are currently generating 40M impressions monthly across all platforms/shows, and 20M video views monthly.